The Biz

You want to stay within the comfortably familiar confines of pro audio. Burrow into Gearslutz. Hang out in ProAudioSpace. But the reality is that you’re going to have to spend as much time on Amazon as on Sweetwater, and in Best Buy and the Apple Store as in GC Pro. It’s inevitable, because the confluence of pro and consumer is far from over. The live sound business is still somewhat protected from the economic tumult that the studio side of the industry has experienced — you still need racks and stacks to move the kind of air that live sound requires, not just near-field monitors and a laptop.

A well-kept secret  is like a well-told story: its impact lies as much in the surprise as in the narrative itself. Solid State Logic’s introduction of its Live console at the Musikmesse/Prolight + Sound show in Frankfurt in April puts the 44-year-old studio-oriented U.K. company into the live-sound arena in a big way. And the company managed to work on the project for three years without sparking the usual rumor mills.

The live touring season gets fully underway this month. There’s a lot riding on it because, while the housing market seems to be coming back, recorded music sales sure aren’t. Even with subscription and streaming services accounting for 15 percent of record business revenue in 2012, according to the RIAA, and digital revenue at 59 percent of total recorded music revenue, the big picture was down one percent from the year before.

There’s been much talk in recent years about how the pro audio industry has become commoditized. There’s no doubt that digital technology and offshore manufacturing have combined to make many products more affordable and accessible, and that the additional number of players attracted to this pool has further propelled commoditization by expanding the scale of the overall pro audio market.

Back in the day (1975, to be exact), Warner Bros. Records put out a trade paperback tome called The Book of the Road. It was a compendium of information about significant venues across the U.S., collected by Jo Berger in Warners’ artist relations department, offering information like stage plots, PA types, FOH and monitor console types with I/O counts, and relevant contact info for stage managers. It grew out of an in-house project for use by the label’s own artists when on tour, and while it never became a best-seller in book form, it caught the fancy of musicians and live-sound techs alike as a kind of Fodor’s for roadies.

If the recent presidential election taught us nothing else, it’s that data has replaced content as the king of media technology. No matter how good a show could potentially be, if you suddenly discover that the FOH console you were expecting to use for it is lying in pieces on the wrong end of a loading dock 2,000 miles away, it’s not the missing faders you’ll really be stressing about but rather the missing information, like channel labels, phase, delay, filters, EQ, inserts, compression ratios, gate thresholds, aux sends and masters settings that those faders would have been accessing.

When I first took on this month’s column, the editor of this publication counseled me not to write about recording studios in this space. “Live and recorded music are two different worlds,” I was told. Going back that far, it was a sensible admonition: with the exception of a relative handful of professional remote-recording trucks, recorded and live music were for the most part distinct realms. Many — if not most — FOH mixers started out in recording studios, but apart from the basic physics of audio, the differences in skillsets and environmental factors were substantial.

With record sales in a decade-long slump, this might seem an inauspicious moment to start a record label. Then again, I’m surprised that Warren Buffet didn’t bid on EMI. As the world’s most successful investor has pointed out more than once, look where everyone is running and then run the other way. So perhaps the announcement, in September, that Yamaha was launching its own record label and video production company might not be as puzzling as it first seems.

If you were a young person thinking about a career in live-event audio, you’d have a lot to consider. First, like many other career choices in music and technology, the apprenticeship model, while still somewhat more viable for live audio than, say, becoming a lawyer, is nonetheless giving way to a more specifically academic path.

We all know about ideas that have been ahead of their times. But one of them that might have come along a decade too soon seems to think that finally, the moment is now right.